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Culminating two years of study and insights from teams representing
diverse viewpoints in practice and academia, the Pathways Commission
released its final report Tuesday on the future of higher education in accounting.

The report,
titled “Charting a National Strategy for the Next Generation of
Accountants,” is available on the commission’s website, pathwayscommission.org.

The Pathways Commission is a joint undertaking of the American
Accounting Association and the AICPA. The two organizations were
charged in 2008 by the U.S. Treasury Advisory Committee on the
Auditing Profession with studying a possible future structure of
higher education (see “New Pathways
to Accounting Excellence,” JofA, Oct. 2010).

The report makes seven broad recommendations, each with specific
objectives and action items. It also identifies impediments to
accomplishing those goals.

The recommendations are:

Build a learned profession for the future by purposeful
integration of accounting research, education, and practice for
students, accounting practitioners, and educators.

Develop mechanisms to meet future demand for faculty by unlocking
doctoral education via flexible pedagogies in existing programs and
by exploring alternative pathways to terminal degrees that align
with institutional missions and accounting education and research
goals.

Reform accounting education so that teaching is respected and
rewarded as a critical component in achieving each institution’s
mission.

Develop curriculum models, engaging learning resources, and
mechanisms for easily sharing them, as well as enhancing faculty
development opportunities in support of sustaining a robust
curriculum.

Improve the ability to attract high-potential, diverse entrants
into the profession.

Create mechanisms for collecting, analyzing, and disseminating
information about the current and future markets for accounting
professionals and accounting faculty.

Convert thought to action by establishing an implementation
process to address these and future recommendations by creating
structures and mechanisms to transition accounting change efforts
from episodic events to a more continuous, sustainable process.

But what most sets the Pathways Report apart from similar previous
initiatives, organizers say, is an ongoing implementation phase. For
the next three years, the effort will be headed by William F. Ezzell
and Mark Higgins. Ezzell, one of the six Pathways commissioners, is
also a past chairman of the AICPA Board of Directors and recently
retired partner at Deloitte LLP. Higgins led one of the commission’s
three “supply chain” working groups and is dean of the College of
Business Administration at the University of Rhode Island.

“We will be out doing whatever we can to encourage, cajole . . . and
anything else we can to interest people in both the profession and
education to experiment and try some of these recommendations,” Ezzell said.

Ezzell said he and the other commission members have already gained
many insights into problems and potential solutions.

“This was an extremely educational process for me, a very open
procedure where we sounded out a lot of different views,” he said.
“There will be some things in the report that people will immediately
embrace and some that may be controversial.”

One action item under the fifth recommendation concerning attracting
promising new students that Ezzell discussed in a presentation to the
AICPA Council meeting in June (see
video) is to make introductory courses in accounting more
interesting and relevant.

“Whether the first course is in
high school or even in college, we’ve historically been too focused on
bookkeeping and debits and credits and failed to give students an
adequate understanding of what accounting is all about, why it has
value,” Ezzell said in an interview.

Another, under the first recommendation, is enhancing the role in
universities of professionally qualified faculty members, those who
may lack a doctoral degree in accounting but who bring valuable
experience from the workplace into the classroom. The report says that
“cultural barriers” in universities can discourage working
professionals from entering teaching.

“Too often, we did find and believe that we’re not making best use
of professionally qualified faculty,” Ezzell said. “They are excellent
resources, but what’s not being done is to involve them at least a
little bit in curriculum setting and in research”

The commission’s chairman, Bruce Behn, the Ergen Professor of
Business and recently named head of the Department of Accounting and
Information Management at the University of Tennessee–Knoxville, said
the commission’s work has been challenging but rewarding. The
commission comprised 50 people who met—sometimes almost daily by
online conference, Behn said—and corresponded to discuss issues and
receive public comment. They also held a public meeting last year (see
“Pathways
Commission Forges Ahead,” JofA, May 2011).

“To put together a report that everybody can be proud of is a pretty
amazing experience,” he said.

Even so, the report only marks the start of the crucial
implementation to come, Behn said.

“With practitioners and academics, sitting side by side to solve the
same problems, the better we can bring those two together, it’s really
going to benefit the profession,” he said.